Today ubExact launched its "direct navigation, action-based search engine" in beta.

The human-edited search engine categorizes content into actions: See It (reference), Do It (entertain), Shop It (buy), and Find It (navigate). The idea is to enable searchers to navigate to a site based on what they hope to accomplish there, making it (ideally) unnecessary to memorize web addresses.

Users select one of the above actions, then type a query into the search box. For example, a search for "starbucks" filtered by "Find It" brings up two URLs: starbucks.com and hearmusic.com, a Starbucks-owned music site. Associated website fees (both sites are free to peruse) and company locations ("Seattle" for the former, "Online" for the latter) are also listed.

One setback to building a human-powered search site from scratch is that ubExact lacks the speedy indexing technology of rivals like Google, Yahoo or Microsoft. For example, a search for "google chrome" under "See It" brings up an empty page, encouraging users to fill in data it's missing:

And the field is already littered with would-bes. One well-known human-powered search engine is Wikia, which launched in beta earlier this year. The site was created by Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, giving it a strong potential user base at outset. Like ubExact, Wikia encourages people to improve its index manually.

Then there's Mahalo. Conceived by Jason Calacanis, the site, also powered by human input, boasts investors like News Corp., CBS and Sequoia Capital. Mahalo launched in alpha last May, pre-indexed with 4,000 of the most popular search terms at the time.